My Name Is Mary Sutter (34 page)

“But I told them all that they would get on a train. They’re waiting. I told them—” But her voice trailed away. Exhaustion was magnifying everything: the wearying hours, the clatter of the trains, the harsh light falling on Stipp’s face. “The men are depending on me. I told them everyone would get on a train.”

“Now you’ll have to tell them something different.”

“But I can’t decide who will go and who will stay.” She was losing her sense of balance; she might topple over the outcrop, tumble down the hill, might prefer that to what Stipp was asking of her. Hovering there, between earth and sky, she thought she heard the distant crackle of gunfire or thunder.

The world declaring the situation dire, as if no one knew.

“Someone has to decide,” Stipp said.

“I can’t.”

“Then go home,” Stipp shouted, and turned and walked away.

Mary put her head in her hands. At home, Amelia would be feeding the baby; dinner would be being served on a white tablecloth, upstairs a bed would be waiting, and sheets, and someone to take her bloodied clothes from her, heat her bath water, and gentle her into a clean bed. Perhaps, even, the months of separation might have rendered Amelia grateful to see her again.

You see, it is a war.
Everything is a war.

“Wait,” Mary cried. She hurried after Stipp and seized his arm, and he wheeled on her. He was utterly changed, even from a moment ago. Sweat and blood matted his beard and hair; his eyes were wild and black. That night, so long ago, when he had tried to bar her from the amputation, angry as he had been, he had looked nothing like this.

“You want to be a surgeon? To be a surgeon is to look a man in the eye and tell him the truth. If you can’t do that, then get out of here. Go home.” He was shouting now, his fury echoing the thunder rising in the distance. Stipp had taken her by the scaffolding of her shoulders as if he no longer trusted her, but now he pulled her into an embrace and whispered, “It is all butchery. Every bit of it. You cannot help them with just whiskey, Mary.”

Mary lifted her face to the sun, but it had fled behind the clouds and rain spilled from the sky.

“Choose who you are,” he whispered into her ear. “Choose who you’ll be.”

She cried out then, but softly, and then a look of recognition flared between them, but only for the briefest moment, and then they parted, Stipp along the ridge, assessing, and Mary threading through the men, resisting the urge to stop, to touch, to soothe, to do any of the things she had been doing moments before. But she did not look away, either, for she was already quantifying and tagging the men in her mind, sorting them one from the other, practicing, steeling herself for the work ahead, because she had already chosen who she was a long time ago, the moment she had inserted a knife into Jenny’s pelvis.

Chapter Forty-four

James Blevens sat across from John Brinton in the Surgeon General’s office at the Riggs Bank Building near the Mansion. Blevens had been called to meet Brinton, who had been appointed to an as yet unnamed post in the office of the Surgeon General. Hammond, the latest man to become surgeon general, was away at the Armory Square Hospital on the mall, meeting victims of the Second Bull Run coming off the trains, trying to get a sense of the numbers and what still needed to be done. Blevens, too, wanted to be there, to see if he could help in some indeterminate way. His hands were still clumsy, though perhaps he could assist, he thought. But for now he was stuck here, trying to understand what this stranger wanted from him. James could hardly keep track of who was in charge anymore. Tripler had been banished; Stanton had made a disastrous plea for the public to become temporary nurses; the new surgeon general was no one anyone knew. The whole business was a great mess.

Brinton, a man of about thirty, leaned across the polished walnut desk and asked, “How are your hands?”

“They’re coming along,” James said.

Brinton nodded. He understood how self-conscious Blevens was about his predicament: a surgeon who had been kept from going to the Peninsula because he had not been able to adequately control a scalpel. Brinton would not embarrass Blevens further by asking how much progress he had made along that line; it was none of his concern. Indeed, it was to his advantage if Blevens were to remain completely out of field work.

“Hammond has instituted a medical museum.”

“A medical museum?”

“A place for research. It is not yet widely known. Joseph Woodward is in charge of the medical portion, I am in charge of the surgical.”

Startled, James said, “I think a place of research is essential. So much is known, but hardly anyone has compiled it. I’ve been looking at specimens, trying to discern cause. Microscopy is helpful, particularly in the stool, but even more so in sputum. The fluids of our bodies harbor more than we think they do. It’s entirely possible that contagion is not so much the effect of humors, but of—” James broke off. He was babbling. The months of isolated research had done that to him. “I think a center for research is an excellent idea,” he concluded.

“I thought you might think so. In this, I believe we will find some purpose for the carnage, if there can be any. Or at least we can make it so. Not just a silver lining, but silver, or gold itself, in the form of collective knowledge.”

“Exactly,” Blevens said. “Will you publish the findings?”

“Yes. Something like the
History of the British Medical Services in the Crimea
, but more extensive. A medical history of the war. We’ll write up cases. I particularly wish to look at statistics—of disease, efficacious treatment, occurrence, et cetera. So many men are dying of disease. I have particular interest, as do you, in microscopy.”

“The
cause
of disease, not just its symptoms.” Now Blevens was leaning forward too, his scarred hands on the desk.

“Yes. True causality, discoverable, I think, in the invisible.”

Blevens exhaled and sat back and worked his fingers, contemplating the depth and breadth of the proposed work

“But I need help,” Brinton said. “At present, what we require are specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which can be regarded as valuable; along with the projectiles and foreign bodies that caused the wound. I need someone with an eye and a passion for research who can convince a field surgeon to go to the trouble of retaining examples of tissue and bone. Someone who’s been on a battlefield, who would know the pressures. From what I understand, you were at Bull Run.”

Blevens nodded.

“We’ll need histories, too, summaries to be sent along with the specimens. It will be a lot of extra work for the surgeons. They’ll need to be persuaded of the value of it, the need for it. I think you ought to explain that the medical officer who sends in a specimen will have his name attached to the report, credit given. This will provide incentive, I think. I need someone like you, someone who can talk the surgeons into seeing the advantage for them, but also someone who is very adept at acquiring specimens. You understand, this will be the entire army collaborating in research.” He studied James, watching for signs of objection, but there were none. “If you are willing, I’ll assign you to follow the Army of the Potomac.”

“To follow them?” Blevens asked. “But haven’t you heard? The army is all here.” That morning, a newspaper boy had been hawking the headlines: “
Retreat from Fairfax Is Complete. Lincoln asks McClellan to Head the Defenses of Washington. Rebel Army in Motion.”

“For now, begin with the Armory Square Hospital. See what you can find. Follow cases, explain what we need. And then, if the war goes on—” He stopped speaking and looked down at the massive desk.

He is ashamed
, Blevens thought. Without the war, there would be no research. Without the war, there would be no opportunity for learning.

They avoided one another’s eyes for a moment.

“Someone has to wring the good from all of this,” Blevens said.

Brinton brightened. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Outside, on Pennsylvania Avenue, Blevens passed a line of Pope’s defeated soldiers hobbling toward Fort Stevens as citizens scurried to stock their homes in case of siege. How he wished he could tell Mary about the project. On his forays to the various hospitals across the city, he had searched for her, but it was as if she had vanished. From time to time he’d even perused the contract and transient nurse lists pouring into the Surgeon General’s office from the hospitals, but that had yielded nothing. Finally, he’d written Amelia, and her reply had hinted of panic and despair. She didn’t know where her daughter was, hadn’t heard from her since she’d sent her off on the train in February. Wasn’t there anything Blevens could do to help? There had been a breach. Jenny had died. Had he heard? Had he seen Mary? The baby was well, though. Thriving. If he found Mary, would he tell her this?

After receiving the letter, James had paid to have his name listed in the City Directory, though he wasn’t certain that Mary would seek him out. In his bleakest moments, he worried that Mary had been unable to forgive herself, worried what she might have done, in desperation. If anyone knew how to end her own life, it would be Mary. But he pushed the unholy thought away. He was imagining, out of worry.

He flagged down a hack, climbed in, and headed for the Armory Square Hospital.

Chapter Forty-five

Jake Miles walked the grounds of Armory Square Hospital with a kind of jiggly, excitable gait that betrayed his agitation, shirttails hanging, his suspenders slipping from his shoulders. He’d been appointed guard when no one else knew what to do with him. In the heat of early September it was simply too hot to tolerate the scratchy, shoddy wool of his uniform jacket. Every so often in his assigned circumlocution of the hospital he crammed his hand down the inside of his pants leg to pluck his flask from its harness and knock back a good swallow. During the months of the hospital’s construction, when his job had been to prevent the theft of building materials, he’d found shelter in the lee of a pile of scrap wood, but all that had been cleaned up. To sneak a swallow now he had to look around and be quick about it. But in the last few days, the growing heap of limbs outside the surgery window had provided a refuge behind which he could hunker down. He squatted with his back turned, his shoulders hunched, knowing that to passersby on the mall he appeared to be reverently tending the pile, whose presence they greeted first with shock, then revulsion, followed by ashamed glances to verify the savagery.

It was near noon. The sun was white in the Washington sky. Jake could see the doctors through the open window of the surgery doing their depraved work of lopping off arms and legs. Jake had no idea if he was supposed to do something with the pile of limbs rising outside the window or not, but he refused to touch them. The wretched stink nauseated. That was the other reason he required the whiskey.

After tucking his flask away, he rose like a phoenix from behind the pile of limbs and sauntered around the side of the hospital to B Street, where ambulances and carriages bearing visitors had been arriving all morning. Jake idly surveyed the visitors, mostly Washington women swaying up the walk in their wide hoop skirts, but there were others whose object in coming was to search for loved ones. They were just off the train from somewhere distant, their faces a collective mask of grief. As Jake studied them, more as a matter of boredom than anything else, a tall man disengaged himself from a hack and strode up the walkway. There was something in his posture that made Jake feel a sudden longing for Bonnie, though he didn’t know why. Something about the way the man walked, or his studied absentmindedness. Jake hid in the corner under the eaves and watched him march past.

Inside the hospital, James Blevens scanned the rows of beds as was his habit, as unconscious to him as his ever-present need to flex his fingers, looking for Mary Sutter. When he saw her, it took a moment to believe it was she. Her dress was torn and bloodstained, her skin tanned and freckled; in her hair were twigs and leaves. Her expression was newly broken. She looked as if she’d been wandering in the woods for days.

She looked up and discovered him. He flexed and unflexed his fingers, wondering what he meant to her.

She came toward him and said, “James.”

No one paid them any mind. Outside, limbs were being piled; what was a public embrace?

In the end, every wounded man had made it onto the trains, every one, except those who had died and had been buried in shallow, unmarked trenches. For four full days, Mary had coolly stood at the railcars and made choices, had trod the impossible line. Had tried to reconcile need with mercy. Just before they left on the last train, Stipp had stopped at Mary’s car and gazed wordlessly up at her before turning away to prowl the grounds around the station, calling out to the hills to ascertain whether or not anyone else remained before he stepped onto the engineer’s car as the train lurched forward, the station burning behind them to keep the Confederates from salvaging anything. Mary hadn’t seen Stipp since. She told herself that the men who had died and been buried beside the station in long trenches would have died anyway, comforting herself like she had comforted the mothers of stillborns. As she had comforted Bonnie. As she had been unable to comfort Amelia.

When she was finished telling James the story, he said, “Extraordinary.”

“Not so extraordinary. There was another woman there, too. Clara Barton. She brought supplies. Jams and jellies. She was feeding everyone. She was of far more use than I.”

“I think it is as Stipp said,” James said. He was being careful, for he had never seen Mary so vulnerable. “There wasn’t room for everyone.”

“But in the end there was.”

James waited before he said, “You are not provident, Mary. There was nothing else you could have done.”

At some point, they had made it out of the hospital and were standing up against the building, sheltered under the eaves. Observing them from around the corner, Jake Miles suddenly placed the man’s long, beak-like face, the sharp gaze, the thin frame. That man was the doctor who’d taken his Bonnie to those Sutters, that woman there who had made a mess of things and cost him his baby and his wife. Tears welled up in his eyes as he remembered how the first night Bonnie had come home, his little boy had clung to his finger while Bonnie had slept, and how Bonnie had waked up and looked at him like that Miss Sutter was looking at that doctor now, as if there were such a thing as hope in the world. For the first time in months, Jake thought of Christian Sutter, how he had poured liquor down his throat, how it had seemed the right thing to do, how he had suffered when he’d gone back to the corner of the train to find Christian as lifeless as the baby Bonnie had carted all the way back to the Sutter house.

James looked up and saw the pale boy peering at them. It took a moment to place him, for he had not thought of him for more than a year. “Jake?”

Jake wiped his tearstained face with the back of his arm and spun away from his perch on a pile of bricks. “Everything is spoiled, you hear me? Everything.”

Mary turned and took in the sight of Jake Miles. His face was flushed, his eyes bright and feverish.

“That Christian shoulda never done what he did,” Jake shouted.

“But Christian is dead,” James said. It seemed brutal to say it in front of Mary, but maybe the boy didn’t know. For a moment James considered telling Jake that Jenny had died, too, in order to forever settle in Jake’s mind the debt he thought the Sutters owed him, but the boy whirled away around the corner of the building and disappeared.

Mary turned pale and closed her eyes. “He’s right. Everything is spoiled.”

James wanted to say that everything wasn’t spoiled; that one day they would learn something from all of this that would change medicine forever. But for now, he didn’t say anything.

For days and days, Mary had been living on courage, but now she could feel it draining away from her. And here was James Blevens, solicitude, like a caress, emanating from his concerned face. “Take me home,” she said.

He startled, for he had thought it would have taken days to persuade her to go home.

“To Albany?” he asked.

“No. My rooms.”

The tenement in Swampdoodle resembled nothing of Dove Street. James Blevens tapped the driver and said, “This can’t be it.”

“It is,” Mary said, descending nimbly from the carriage, surprising James, because she had rested on his shoulder all the way here in the hack, rousing only to say, turn here, turn there. James paid the driver, jumped from the carriage, and took Mary by the elbow, letting her guide him up to a musty room that might rent on the quay in Albany by the hour. Or something in Five Points. The memory brought him up short. He had not thought of Sarah in months.

If Amelia could see this
, he thought.

Mary sat on her bed and did not move, and he understood that she would lie down in her dirty clothes and sleep if he did not help her. She did not resist when he undid her buttons, helped her to ease her dress around her shoulders. He had touched women as a physician, and he summoned that detachment now, and the self-control allowed the intimacy. He lifted a blanket from the bed and held it up, and she rose, her back to him, and dropped the dress in a heap to the floor and slid the straps of her camisole and her underwear to the floor also. When she was done removing her undergarments, she sank onto the bed and slid under a sheet and James laid the blanket over her.

He removed his coat and hat and searched under the dresser for her bath basin. In the alley, he pumped brackish water. He ran the wet washcloth over her scratched arms, her smudged face, down the length of her back. He untangled her hair as she slept, painstakingly removing twigs and broken leaves, exercise for his stiff fingers. The window opened to the alley, and the shrieks and bellows of Swampdoodle bounced off the narrow passageway.

It was the sixth of September. Mary had said she’d left on the thirtieth with all those volunteer nurses. Four days out in the field, and then three at the hospital. She might sleep forever, he thought.

And she did sleep through James’s coming and going, the clatter of the kettle on the stove and the putting away of the coffee and bread and butter he had purchased for her. The day passed into evening and then into night, and he slept next to the open window in the one chair, his feet stretched before him like a steel gate, guarding Mary from the world.